‘I came to a situation where I was living in a nightmare. I had nightmares all the time — dreaming of flying and cycling, but always crash-landing. Dreams about food, but torture dreams. I hallucinated. I saw food on the patches of the floor. I saw a sausage through the wall and tried to break through the cement to get it.’
Such nightmares occur in the novel based on his experience. The worst ones in the book are of rape and beatings and violent crash-landings, but the nightmares are preferable to the reality of imprisonment. Wahome wrote of Chipota, ‘Then a flash of light and he woke up from the nightmare to realize that he was still within the walls of the cell … He wished he could go back to the nightmare.’
Craving to be returned to the nightmare was exactly how he had felt, he told me. He was desolated to wake from a bad dream to see himself ankle deep in water and shivering, pissing and shitting in the water, not able either to stand or sit.
I said, ‘Where did the Kenyans learn this torture technique?’
‘Maybe from Romania. They were friendly to us then.’
‘What about your family? Did they know where you were?’
‘They had no idea. I was thirty-five at the time, with two young children. They didn’t know I was in the middle of Nairobi, in a dark torture cell at Nyayo House. After five or six days I got to recognize daytime from the noise above me.’
‘Weren’t you tempted to confess?’ I asked.
Again he smiled the crooked smile and said, ‘Before I was arrested I had been amazed by all the people who had confessed to crimes. I had no idea why they said they were guilty — I knew they weren’t but they said they were. Now I knew. I was in the dark, in water. My feet were rotting. I was on the point of breakdown. I thought of suicide. When a week passed they must have thought I was dying, because they put me in a dry cell.’
But the interrogation continued. He was blindfolded and taken to the twenty-second floor of Nyayo House and locked in a room with his interrogator, always the same man, always the same questions: ‘When did you join MwaKenya?’ MwaKenya was an underground movement opposing the government. ‘Who recruited you?’ ‘What books have you read?’
He denied being a member of any underground movement. When he said he had read Mother, by Maxim Gorky, the interrogator (‘He was very moody’) screamed, ‘That’s a recruitment manual!’
This went on for an hour or so, and then he was returned to his cell in the basement. But he knew he was weakening, on the point of breakdown, and he still felt suicidal. It was not limbo, he assured me, but ‘a hell of suspense.’
He said that his happiest time was when he was given a chance to wash the prisoners’ dinner plates. ‘That was my highest moment. There was a mirror in the room. I looked at my face. The washing took no more than five or ten minutes, but I loved it. I was doing something. That was great.’
Wahome realized that the suspense was weakening him and that he preferred to serve a specific sentence than suffer not knowing when his confinement would end.
He said, ‘I told them this. They gave me three options — various crimes I could confess to. I chose the third — sedition, the sentence was the shortest. So they photographed me.’
He paused in this awful story and shook his head, remembering a detail — a Kafkaesque moment in a Kafka-like story.
‘I was smiling when they took my picture,’ he said, flashing me the same smile. ‘I was happy.’
He was taken to court in the evening, so as not to attract attention. His family still had no idea where he was. He had no lawyer. He was in handcuffs, in the dock.
‘The prosecuting attorney was Bernard Chunga,’ Wahome said. ‘You might see his name in the paper. He was rewarded. He spoke as though he knew my crime.
‘ “The accused is an intelligent man. He knew a crime was being committed and he chose not to report the offense to the lawful authority” — blah-blah-blah. The judge, H. H. Buch, was a Muhindi’ — an Indian. ‘The whole trial took about seven minutes. But I was happy! I was given fifteen months. It was something definite — not torture anymore.’
He said that this sort of arrest was very common in Kenya into the early 1990s. Altogether, he was in three prisons, all of them in rural areas, places where there were nearby villages, and wild game, the colorful Kenya of the tourist trade and postcard pictures of smiling highly ornamented tribespeople.
He was in solitary confinement most of the time, denied paper and pencils. He found a copy of The Rainbow, by D. H. Lawrence, and read it ten or twelve times. ‘Funnily enough, I can’t remember a thing about it!’ He found another book, Spanish Made Easy In the short period in the exercise yard he taught the others some Spanish, but the guards suspected they were being whispered about, and the book was confiscated. He spent the time daydreaming. He contracted malaria and seemed to suffer a weekly attack of fever.
On his release, he went home and back to his job on the newspaper. ‘I didn’t hate my captors. I thought, They should feel ashamed.’ He was not alone in his experience, or even in his book. Many Kenyans have been imprisoned on trumped-up charges, many have written similar accounts of detention and torture. Books such as Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Detained had helped prepare him; Darkness at Noon, which Wahome read later, he loved for its accuracy in detailing the particularities of prison life.
‘I went on writing. The government wanted to break me. I wanted to prove they were wrong. Prison was a sort of baptism for me, but for others I knew it was horrible. They never recovered. They were traumatized. Even now they are broken. But I wanted to survive. It was difficult. When I got out my friends were afraid of me.’
‘But those policemen and interrogators must still be around,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ Wahome said. That ironic smile again. ‘A few years ago I was sitting on a bus. I looked across the aisle and saw the man who had interrogated me. “Who recruited you?” Him! When he saw me he pretended to be asleep.’
‘Weren’t you angry?’
‘No. I was scared. I was paranoid. I got off the bus.’
The torturer, homeward bound, jogging along on the city bus with the other commuters, became for me one of the enduring images of urban Kenya.
Wahome Mutahi, whom I saw as a hero, not a victim, became my friend, my rafiki. Walking around Nairobi he talked about the past and his family, he showed me the good bookstores and coffee shops, the streets to avoid, what remained of the old market town. We looked at what was left of the US Embassy which had been bombed in 1998 — most of the area, near the railway station, was still wrecked. Wahome advised me on buying the things I would need for my onward journey to western Kenya and the Ugandan border. In one bookstore I bought him a copy of The Mosquito Coast and he bought me his prison book. He inscribed his To Bwana Theroux, and we said kwaheri and promised to stay in touch.
A few days later, reading The Nation, I saw the name of the man who had prosecuted Wahome after his confession under torture. Chief Justice Bernard Chunga, now dispensing sanctimony, ‘appealed to organizations caring for juveniles to ensure that they handled them in accordance with international standards.’
High-mindedness was a theme in Kenyan speeches that month, because the US ambassador, Mr Carson, had delivered a stern warning in a pep talk to Kenyan businessmen that Kenya was in danger of losing its preferential trade status. To help feeble African economies, the US Congress had passed the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which provides a visa system for these countries to ship goods to the United States without having to observe quotas. The charitable idea was intended to encourage local industries, but all it did was encourage local criminality. In Kenya this by-pass had become a huge moneymaking scam. After paying some backhanders to high-ranking Kenyans, Chinese and Indian manufacturers were labeling their goods ‘Made in Kenya,’ and transshipping them to the States through Kenya.